How did your Summer drift by this Year?
George Stamatakis
The new solo exhibition by Giorgos Stamatakis, entitled How did your Summer Drift by this Year?, presented concurrently on both floors of the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center from October 16, constitutes a bold foray by the visual artist into an original and unprecedented dimension of his creative practice.
George Stamatakis’s profound preoccupation with the anthropogenic burden upon the planetary ecosystem reemerges here through a heterodox perspective: transcending any latent impulse toward environmental awareness or ecological awakening, the present exhibition does not endeavour to evoke in the viewer a mournful and unbearable sense of guilt. On the contrary, it daringly asserts that both destruction and death may, in fact, offer an unparalleled potential for aesthetic experience.
Inspired by a familiar spectacle of summer holidays in Mediterranean countries and beyond—forest wildfires and crown blazes raging incessantly for countless days—George Stamatakis aestheticizes an imaginal semblance of the terrestrial ecosphere, that ordinarily inclines toward a reflexive melancholy. Yet here the viewer does not merely enter ephemerally into an opened field of contemplative isolation prompted by personal guilt for the anthropogenic devastation of Earth’s biogenic surfaces; but rather, on account of an objective beauty: a mysterious allure that resonates obscurely within every form of natural (or man-made) catastrophe, intuitively transcending all individual feelings of culpability and mourning.In a certain sense, these carbonized landscapes crystallize a more romantic facet of the temperate summer.
The polyptych 15th of August, which unyieldingly renders a quintessentially summer impression of fire-scorched forests and ashen mountains, as well as the gloom depictions of rocky biotopes and incandescent trees on canvas, embody precisely —beyond a holographic summation of the inner tendencies shaping the artist’s long-standing oeuvre, that is, an embodiment of his sustained research and scientific observation of a wild and daemonic nature(which he approaches with reverence, almost suffused with an esoteric tincture of a pantheistic mysticism of a personal Naturphilosophie) as well as a heartfelt anguish before the grim annihilation of the planet’s habitats; a sincere anxiety suffused, on the one hand, with an intense drive toward collective awakening, and, on the other, with a courageous embrace of the ultimate certitude in the face of impending obliteration—a similar kind of tranquil telescopy in the face of fiery annihilation.These blackened masses of charred mountain peaks and fire-swept groves—despite their inherent tragedy—indeed contain something beautiful, perhaps deriving from the levelling objectivity of death itself.
George Stamatakis here consciously returns to a philosophical perspective that has been variously articulated across different cultures, from Europe to Japan: namely, the view that every form of destruction and decay may imaginatively serve as a most legitimate object of aesthetic judgment. This may manifest either through the transcendent pleasure of the sublime—experienced when one contemplates a catastrophic natural calamity from afar—or through the subtle internalization of transience in the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, where the deliberate corrosion of the object itself is cheerfully offered as a source of aesthetic delight. The monumental installation Run—comprising twenty floor-based compositions and a hand-tinted photograph of plant species from the Mediterranean flora printed on natural silk—is distinguished (through the sophisticated juxtaposition of its chosen materials) by an interactive dialectic of animate motion and carbonized inertia; of electrified life and incinerated stillness. The viewer, like a summer wanderer, drifts dream-struck among these fragile trees of regenerative imagination, as time unexpectedly collapses into space. With each slow or hurried step, every silken tree—gently enveloped by an August breeze— is instantaneously incinerated into a fiery ruin, as the airy movements of the silk are cremated into arboreal masses of freshly kindled ash.
Observing, however, the artistic trajectory of George Stamatakis over the course of this labyrinthine five-year period, it appears that a long and meticulous study of pictorial space—of both background and landscape—has now reached its consummation.Through his spectral painting, a mute constellation of structural elements gradually and faintly begins to emerge. Amid theincinerated forest clusters and pallid highlands, a few perishable imprints of artificial remnants and constructive ruins become discernible. These hidden traces ofelectric pylons, power-bearing and galvanized railings attest to the human presence through a kind of visual apophatism: the human element is testified to solely by its utter absence. Yet these electrotechnical structures remain the active debris of the human soul; and this material aftersound of human energy suffices, on an unsuspecting summer day, to ignite a pyrogenic cataclysm of unfathomable proportions. These otherworldly ceramic compositions—together with the restrained incorporations of polychromatic elements and the more formal sculptural tendencies—soberly herald a fertile transition toward a new period in George Stamatakis’s work. The solo exhibition How Did Your Summer Drift by This Year? boldly assimilates the adventurous experience of the summer wanderer, who not only refuses to succumb to a dismal panic before the spectacle of fiery devastation (as witnessed in the course of certain summer misadventures), but, on the contrary, derives aesthetic pleasure from this unique vision; for within the biocosmic cycle of nature, death constitutes nothing more than a tedious transmutation of energy.
Aias Christofis
